Bloomfilter’s Enterprise Pivot: Why This Technical Founder Abandoned PLG After Discovering Users Don’t Choose Transparency

Bloomfilter’s Enterprise Pivot: Why This Technical Founder Abandoned PLG After Discovering Users Don’t Choose Transparency

Product-led growth seems like the perfect strategy for technical founders. Build something users love, let them adopt it organically, and watch it spread through organizations. But what happens when your product’s core value proposition creates accountability that users actively avoid?

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Andrew Wolfe, Co-CEO of Bloomfilter, shared how this exact realization forced a complete transformation of their go-to-market strategy.

The Initial PLG Vision When Bloomfilter launched its software development process mining platform, the plan seemed straightforward: target project managers who desperately needed better metrics and insights. The bottom-up adoption playbook was clear – provide value to individual users, then expand through organizations.

“When we first started, we actually thought we’d be a PLG type company and it’d be land and expand, and we would try to sell it through product managers and project managers who want these metrics,” Andrew explains.

The Transparency Paradox But early customer conversations revealed a fundamental flaw in this approach. “As we started talking to people, they were very excited. And then I think slowly they realized the level of accountability that would come from the kind of transparency and observability we give into people’s process that doesn’t exist today,” Andrew recalls. The stark conclusion? “People don’t really sign up for more scrutiny.”

This insight forced a complete rethinking of their go-to-market strategy. If individual users wouldn’t voluntarily adopt tools that increased their accountability, the only path forward was top-down implementation.

The Enterprise Pivot The pivot to enterprise sales aligned perfectly with Andrew’s network of CTOs and CIOs built during his consulting years. But it required more than just changing sales targets – it demanded a complete reimagining of their customer profile.

Through extensive customer conversations – over 150 of them – they discovered their ideal customer profile: organizations with 30-300 engineers, pre-matrix structure, using cloud-based tools. “That sounds hyper specific,” Andrew notes, “but it took a lot of iterations and a lot of running our heads on the wall.”

The Cost of Hesitation Looking back, Andrew regrets not trusting their instincts sooner: “We kind of knew deep down that we were going to be this transparency tool and this accountability tool… And yet we ignored our gut there.” This hesitation cost them “two to three months” of progress.

The Broader Lesson For technical founders, Bloomfilter’s pivot reveals a crucial truth: your go-to-market strategy must align with not just your product’s features, but its organizational impact. Products that create accountability, transparency, or significant process changes often require top-down mandates for successful adoption.

This isn’t just about software development tools. Any product that introduces organizational transparency – whether in sales performance, resource allocation, or team productivity – may face similar resistance to bottom-up adoption.

The key is recognizing these dynamics early and adapting your go-to-market strategy accordingly. Sometimes the fastest path to growth isn’t through individual users, but through leaders who have both the authority to mandate change and the motivation to embrace greater transparency.